In the organization they are “quite alarmed and concerned” about starting 2022 “with three murders in a row.”
The “bloodbath” that Mexican journalists have suffered this beginning of the year is something that to date “has not been observed with such intensity,” he denounced this Thursday in an interview with Eph the representative in the country of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Balbina Flores.
In the organization they are “quite alarmed and concerned” about starting 2022 “with three murders in a row.”
So far this year, they have killed José Luis Gamboa in Veracruz, while in Tijuana they have murdered Margarito Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado, who even publicly asked the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for protection in 2019.
“It is a trend that unfortunately we have seen for years, but of course it is something that we had not observed with as much intensity as it has this year,” Flores said.
a deadly country
RSF has considered Mexico for three years in a row as the “deadliest country for the press” by recording 10 journalists killed in 2019, eight in 2020 and seven in 2021, in addition to three missing.
“We see that the situation, instead of improving, worsens,” considered the representative of the association, who stressed that the attacks have spread throughout the territory.
In addition to the murders, RSF counts around 40 displaced journalists from regions with violence, where it is increasingly difficult to report.
“There are these zones of silence that have been generated over the years and that in this six-year term has not been different. That is, zones where journalists can no longer carry out their journalistic work,” Flores explained.
Lourdes: victim of impunity
The case of Maldonado, murdered last Sunday, arouses particular indignation because in March 2019 he denounced in President López Obrador’s daily conference that his life was in danger due to a legal dispute with Jaime Bonilla, today the former official governor of the state of Baja California.
The Mexican president asked not to link the murder “automatically” with Bonilla and justified that she was not in the “Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists” created by a 2012 federal law.
Although the reporter was in the local mechanism of Baja California, governed by the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena), the federal government “is the one who should have given her the measures because it was a public request, it was a risk,” said the representative. of RSF.
“Of course we consider that they were not strong enough measures that could guarantee their safety, so that seems serious to us,” said the defender.
With this, Maldonado has become a reflection of impunity in Mexico, which exceeds 93% of the cases of murdered journalists, according to RSF.
Double speech
The defender pointed out the double discourse of López Obrador, who affirms that freedom of the press is respected and assures that there is no impunity either.
“But on the other hand we also have these events that occur constantly, with which we see that there is no forceful action to go against this situation of impunity. Nor obviously the strengthening of protection mechanisms,” Flores said.
In addition, despite the violence, the president has not stopped attacking the critical press in his daily conferences, in which he has a “Who’s who in the lies of the week” section to showcase journalists with “fake news” .
“We do not want to say or affirm that it is totally contributing to this situation, but it does contribute to this rarefaction of the environment, where journalists are less and less respected,” Flores commented.
society is losing
The RSF activist warned that “one of the main affected” by this violence is Mexican society.
“It is a society that is losing out loud, that is losing journalists who make known the information that occurs in the corners of the country, that is, it is a country that is running out of information,” he emphasized.
Therefore, he asked the international community to look towards Mexico and urged the president to stop treating the press as his enemy.
“The enemy is not the journalists, it is not the society that questions and it is not the defenders. The enemies are in impunity, they are in the government structures that have not been able to counteract this situation”, he concluded. (I)
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